Euphoria on an October Night

Costume-Creator's-Euphoria, that is.

October is a very artsy month in our household, but not in the way you’re thinking. There are no pretty paintings of autumn leaves, none of those pinterest-style hand prints painted up for Halloween.

First, there is decorations:

October starts out with a very important trip to a store. In this store there are talking witches, and the likes. Unsuspecting little children walk onto the sensors and the show begins. Talking witches disturb the boy (he takes after his mother), but fascinate the tot. The differences in personalities fascinate me. We carry on around the store to examine all the strange happenings, and end up buying a couple of those $1 wooden masks to add to the growing collection. And every year, later that night, I stare at the unpainted things and wonder Why in hell did I let the children talk me into buying these things? And then I paint them, and remember that painting is really relaxing. Clearly, the children had my best interest at heart.

That's a little tot sabotaging my picture.

Then we get out the random things we have put up in the closet from the prior year. There is the random trinkets collected from a Halloween party we went to, including one of those little rubbery skeletons. The tot calls it “baby skeleton” very affectionately and carries it around like a baby doll. Actually, she says “baby kel-ton,” which endears the little piece of rubber to me too.

We’ve also saved the remote controlled tarantula that someone gave the boy for his birthday one year, but being a China-made piece of junk, stopped working after a week. Now the boy just trots it around the house manually at random throughout October. It gets left somewhere, the tot sees it, demands to be picked up and carried to safety despite knowing it is fake, and then I try to reason with her because I am in the middle of dishes and am highly inconvenienced, which is highly impractical because no one can reason with a two-year-old, until finally I toss the spider up somewhere high…and then it is found on the floor again later when I step on it. Why did I keep that damn spider?

If you are reading this comment, then congrats on your attention span! You are about halfway through.

Next, costumes:

Halloween was my favorite holiday as a child. My best friend and I would spend weeks developing our costumes, coordinating our themes of course, and going for something eccentric. Night-blooming jasmin was always heavy in the air, a smell that until adulthood I thought was somehow related to pumpkins because it always showed up after jack-o-lanterns were carved. Kids are full of irrational ideas.

One year we dressed up as our ancestors, complete with poufy dresses from the thrift store and names picked out of the family tree. I think we were both fairly optimistic, giving ourselves fancy dresses—my ancestors were all poor farmers. We’d hit the streets, free of adults, collecting enough candy to knock back our immune systems for a few weeks. There was a feeling of magic in the air, being outside late and free, but a sense of safety about the place with all the neighborhood kids at the same purpose. We’d convene on someone’s driveway and do the great candy trade—there was always that one kid in the neighborhood you could off-load the weird stuff on.

I carry on the seriousness of costumes with my kids, handmade all the way. It’s always a marathon event, wherein I knock both costumes out in twenty-four hours, and suffer a great deal in the process. Sometime around 2AM euphoria strikes as I’m finishing up. I remember it well last year as I put the finishing touches on the monster mask that required about ten layers of papier-mâché to complete. It came on suddenly, and I said out loud to the silent house: “I am a genius! How did I not know it all these thirty-two years?” I stared with adoration at the completed costume, “My god, I’m brilliant. This is a piece of beauty that shall be preserved for future generations!” Then I fell asleep on the couch, intending to stare at the physical manifestation of my brilliance for at least another twenty minutes.

I awoke in the morning, looked around at the scraps of fabric and papier-mâché paste drippings all over the place, and the costume that I screwed up some part of in my exhaustion. I figuratively fell flat on my face from my high.

Here’s a bit of my imperfect genius over the last few years, which the kids rediscovered in the closet this afternoon. First, the owl costumes, back when the children couldn’t think for themselves and therefore I could make them match. It was so easy, I just said to the three-year-old, “If you are an owl you can say ‘whoo whoo’ as you fly around the house.” Sold.

They were really cute - I promise, really, they were.

Dear Diary, look at the pumpkin. The boy (then a tot), really looked handsome in this one. And I nearly drove myself mad making it. I definitely had costume-creators-euphoria after that one.

Every two year old should be nice fat pumpkin at some point.

And then we have last year’s work. The boy wanted to be the monster in the Berenstein Bear’s Halloween book. Yep, that took some blood, sweat, and tears.

This picture is as foggy as my memory of that moment of glory.

This year, you ask? The boy is going to be a rocket—no sewing! Oh, it’s going to be so easy. (I am lying to myself.) The tot wants to be a mermaid. That one will definitely bring on the euphoria. Sometime in the wee hours of the next few days I will be crying out “I am a genius!” But no one will be awake to hear me.

October is for weird art. It’s an October tradition.